Russian Trolls Pose as Reputable Media to Sow US Election Chaos

Source: Jozef Polc via Alamy Stock Photo

In the final days of the 2024 US election season, Russian state-backed actors are pushing enormous amounts of fake news disguised as information from reputable news outlets with the intention of flooding the American news ecosphere with enough garbage to influence who eventually wins the White House.

The Kremlin’s full-scale propaganda push, named Operation Overload by researchers at Recorded Future who uncovered the effort, is pretty basic: influence the outcome of the US election by overwhelming already thread-bare newsroom resources. If the handful of journalists and trusted news sources left standing in the US are endlessly deploying scarce investigative resources to chase down fake news, there are fewer journalists left to debunk the junk.

It’s an effective tactic that has been used by Operation Overload before. The Russian state-backed group honed its fake news skills with similar campaigns in France recently, Recorded Future pointed out in its report.

“Previously attempting to undermine the 2024 French elections and the Paris Olympics, the operation is now shifting its focus to the 2024 US presidential election,” the report warned. “It involves creating fake news sites, false fact-checking resources, and AI-generated audio that mimics legitimate media outlets.”

The group also adds branding and logos that make the disinformation look like it’s from a trusted US news organization, making it difficult for consumers to know what’s real and what isn’t.

Taking Aim at Tim Walz

Most recently, the Russian fake news farm has been pushing disinformation against vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

“Based on newly available intelligence, for example, the IC assesses that Russian influence actors manufactured and amplified inauthentic content claiming illegal activity committed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate during his earlier career,” an alert from the office of the director of national intelligence warned on Tuesday.

Besides fake news doctored up to look like legitimate reports, AI-generated content, and flooding media with propaganda to fact check, the effort relies heavily on automated social media posts to continuously pump out bad information, Recorded Future said.

It’s on Elon Musk’s X platform where many of the Operation Overload disinformation gets a lot of traction. Three separate false narratives being pushed by the Russian troll farm against Walz in recent days were traced back to X accounts by CBS News.

In the days to come, Recorded Future warned Operation Overload will continue to push three distinct varieties of disinformation aimed at influencing the outcome of the US election: stoking political violence, targeting candidates, and vilifying Ukrainians as well as the LGBTQIA+ community.

“The operation seeks to directly inject influence content into mainstream discussion of contentious political issues, eroding public trust in the democratic process, provoking US domestic concerns of political violence and ‘civil war,’ and exploiting existing social divisions,” the report explained.